The thaw

Thankfully it looks like the current stint of minus this and more minus that is swapped for lots of warmish rain. Keeping ourselves warm with the activity of exposing most things to oak!

Icicles and two frozen coolers!

You know you are up against it when the first thing you see of a morning are icicles that are more like stalactites right out side your door!

The distillery was simmering at minus six with our condensers frozen solid! All that was missing was a snow angel, but not for long:

Oh so snowy

A drive in through Narnia this morning and now its a bit of a rum day (ha ha). Hopefully as the weather improves so will the "jokes".

The big freeze

Its so British to be overly occupied with the weather, but we do have a lot of it! (Not sure if that makes much sense or indeed is valid as a distinction from any other country!)

This week has had its challenges with temperatures as low as minus 12 pipes froze all over the place.

Water is very important to use. We use purified water in our products and standard water for cooling. With froze pipes cooling become an issue. Even when its about minus 4.5 for most of the day that big blanket of cold air is not enough to cool one of our condensing worms, which is having to strip out the ca 15kw of energy that's gone into one of our pot stills. It makes for a "constant" day having to scoop out hot water and rally round to find cold water the keep the condenser condensing!

That said, with the cyan blue skies and the crisp hoarse frost it was a beautiful day!

Winter has arrived

A nice minus 9 on the drive in this morning.

Thankfully its nearly tropical at the distillery at a balmy minus 8

Rum and vodka on and the place smells mouth watering!

Our barrels have arrived

Another snowy day and a bone-penetrating -1.5 C, but spirits (no pun intended) lifted high with the first delivery of our barrels. Non-stop whiskey production for here on in! Plus Old Salt Rum and of course 2013 Christmas Spirit to name just three!

That said tomorrow's a big day with the arrival of Concrete Cow Breweries wort for malt production!

The best use for heads and tails

Another crisp start to the day. As you know we don't use heads or tails in our products, but we do use them.....
... to heat our visitors centre.

Snowy start to the week

Up until a few days I go we were enjoying the near balmy January and now the snap has arrived.

A part from the odd frozen hose we are trucking on nicely with vodka and malt running today and rum set for tomorrow. The real focus is the childlike angst of waiting for our oak barrels to arrive. Hopefully this afternoon, but maybe the snow will slow things down. Up to 4 inches expected here before 9pm tonight. Wrap up warm and I strongly suggest a good glass of Old Salt Rum to warm the cockles and draw your mind to a brief spot of day dreaming in a warm westerly direction.

Year 2 ding ding

Our second year of production has commenced and boy it has been a busy one. Who ever said January was a slow time for spirits might have been looking at the wrong spirit!

The end of year festivities did not take their toll.

One of the beautiful by-products of our Old Salt Rum was it finding its way into some superb mince pies. That said the mere thought of a mince pie any time during the next ten months does make my tummy knot up.

It has been a malt and rum mad start to the year. Our first batch of malt spirit never made it into oak as everyone thought is was rather spot on with out modification. So this batch is to be smuggled past the cunning eyes of our patrons and casked-off next week.

So too Old Salt Rum will find its way to oak along with this year's Christmas Spirit (Easter Eggs in summer etc), which we are making this month with even more bells and whistles than version 1 - not a single bottle remains!

Our New Year's resolution is Newsletters! So you don't have to suffer struggling through the blog!

Happy New Years everyone.